Wrath of Kings Read online

  Ethrian was not reassured. He was an inland child. He did not know a dolphin from a shark. Of sharks he had heard from his father’s friend, Bragi Ragnarson. His godfather had told cruel, grim stories of the great killers ravening amongst the crews of ships wrecked in fell sea-battles.

  His struggles earned him nothing but a belly full of salt water.

  The dolphins surrounded him. They bore him up and carried him to the desert shore. With his last spark of energy he dragged himself across the rocky beach into the shadow of a cliff. He collapsed, puked seawater till his guts ached, fell asleep.

  Something wakened him. The time was deep night. The moon was high and full. He listened. He had thought he heard a voice calling, but now there was nothing.

  He looked down at the beach. Something was moving there, making little clacky sounds… He saw them. Crabs. Scores of them. They seemed to be staring at him, waving their claws like soldiers’ salutes. One by one, they scuttled closer.

  He drew away, frightened. They meant to eat him! He sprang to his feet and stumbled away. The crabs became agitated. They could not keep his pace.

  He seated himself a hundred yards away. Stones had torn his feet and barked his shins.

  Again, faintly, he thought he heard someone calling. He could distinguish neither direction nor words.

  He stumbled a little farther, then collapsed and slept again.

  He had strange dreams. A beautiful woman in white came and spoke to him, but he could not understand her, nor did he remember her when he wakened.

  Daylight was almost gone. He was hungry and thirsty. His whole body ached. His sunburned skin had blistered. He tried drinking from the sea. His stomach refused the brine. For a time he lay on the sand in an agony of heaving.

  He rose and surveyed the land by twilight. It was utterly without life. There were no plants. No cliff swallows wheeled against the gathering darkness. No sundown insects hummed the air. Even the rocks were barren of lichens. The only living things he had seen were the crabs, which had come from the sea.

  A touch of cunning came upon him. He settled himself near the water, watching the waves charge toward his toes, peter out, and slide away.

  He used a stone to smash several crabs when they came. He ripped out salty flesh and ate till his stomach again rebelled.

  He retreated from the water and slept a few hours more.

  The moon was up when he wakened. He thought he heard voices. He crawled out to the sand, where he could stand and walk without further injuring his feet. Searching the line of cliffs, he thought, for an instant, that he saw a woman in white staring out to sea, her arms lifted as if in supplication. Her clothing whipped around her, yet the air was completely still.

  She disappeared when he moved to a better vantage.

  He considered his predicament. He had to get off the beach and find food and water. Especially water. And something useful as clothing, else the sun would cook him alive.

  He could see no way up the cliffs.

  He started walking along the strand.

  Exhaustion overcame him soon after dawn. He crawled into a shadow and slept among jagged rocks. His tongue felt like a ball of wool.

  The tide came in. The sea pounded the rocks, thundering, hurling white spray thirty feet into the air. And again Ethrian dreamed.

  Again a woman in white came. Again he could understand nothing she said.

  And again he wakened after dark, and ambushed crabs, and thought of walking on down the beach in search of a break in the cliffs.

  The tide was out, yet seemed to be in. The crash of breakers seemed far, far away. Over them, he heard the faintest creaking, then clanking and shouting. He settled on a boulder, waited to see what was happening.

  Suddenly, he saw what looked like a fleet of a thousand ships out on the white-capped sea. Boats plunged through the surf like raging black horses, scraped on sand and shingle, discharged lean, dark-bearded men in alien armor. Shorter, fairer men in armor equally strange met them on the beach. Their swords flashed and sang.

  A voice called out above the roar of battle. Ethrian looked up. A woman in white stood upon the clifftop, her arms outstretched. Blue fire crackled among her fingers.

  Blue witchfire played over the white-winged vessels upon the sea. Leviathans surfaced and flung themselves at the ships. Sharks and porpoises swam to the woman’s song, ignoring one another as they attacked the swarthy invaders.

  Then ruby bolts flashed from the ships, pounding the cliffs. Great walls of stone fell on the combatants on the beach….

  Winged things arced across the moon, their mouths trailing tongues of fire. Creatures bigger than men rode their scaly backs, vast black cloaks trailing behind them. In their hands they bore spears of light which they hurled at the woman in white.

  She spun webs of blue and cast them into the firmament. They fluttered toward the winged lizards like merry moths, wrapped themselves about the dragons, and brought them tumbling to earth.

  One thing Ethrian noted through the flash and flame: The land was alive. Riotously alive. It could not be the desert that held him captive on its shore.

  The vision began to fade. He looked this way and that, trying to make sense of it. It was gone before he could grasp anything more.

  He looked toward where the woman had stood. There was a gap where the red bolts had bayoneted the cliffs. A gap where, earlier, he thought there had been nothing but solid cliffline.

  He crept that way, unsure, cautious. The moon was high now. He could see the tumbled stone well.

  It was not a fresh fall. Ages had gnawed at the boulders in the slide.

  A voice seemed to call from the desert beyond.

  He froze.

  It was another of the ghost voices. He shrugged. He had no time for mysteries. His great task was to survive. To do that he had to get off this shore.

  The climb was an epic of pain. And he found nothing above but moon-silvered desert vistas. More land utterly without life. Yet… yet he heard the voices. Wordless voices. They called.

  What was this land? What forgotten spirits haunted its barrens? Gingerly, he limped in the direction whence the voices seemed to come.

  His feet were swollen, raw, and festering. His tongue was fat and dry. His sunburn blisters were breaking. He ached in every sinew and joint. A throbbing pain beat from temple to temple.

  But he was stubborn. He went on. And, in time, the descending moon outlined something atop the nearest mountain.

  The more he studied it, the more it looked like some gargantuan figure carved from the mountain itself. It was a great sphinxlike creature, facing eastward.

  Something crackled beneath his foot. He stooped. It was a twig with a few dry leaves attached. It had been tumbled along by the wind. It was acacia, though he did not recognize it, never having seen the tree.

  His heart leapt. Where trees grew there must be water. He limped faster, moving like a man dancing on coals.

  Dawn came. He was stumbling and falling more than walking. His hands and knees were raw. The great stone beast loomed high ahead, up just a few hundred yards of slope.

  It was larger than he had estimated. It reared at least two hundred feet into the air, and stretched back out of sight over the lip of the flat space surrounding it. It was very old and time-worn. The once deeply carven features were all but invisible now.

  He paid little heed to the stone figure. His eyes were all for the scraggly trees around the fabulous creature’s forepaws.

  The sun beat at his naked back, igniting new agonies. Though he fell more and more often, he pressed on. Crawling, he dragged himself onto the flat area.

  Water! A shallow pool lay between the monster’s feet… He heaved himself upright and tottered forward, fell on his face half in and half out of the moisture in the depression. He gulped the algae-thick, stagnant water till his belly ached.

  Only minutes later he heaved it up again.

  He waited, and drank more, though sparingly this time.
Then he splashed across the pool into a shadow that looked like it would persist all day. He collapsed into a fetal ball and slept.

  He dreamed strange and powerful dreams.

  The woman in white came. She examined his hurts. Where her fingers touched the pain went away. He looked on himself and found that he had healed. He tried to mask his nakedness with his hands. She smiled gently and went to stand between the monster’s paws. She stared at the moon lifting out of the sea, limning the fortress riding the spine of the island off the coast.

  Ethrian joined her. He gazed upon the desert, and saw it as it might have been. Lush, rich, peopled by an industrious, pious race…. But there were fires burning on the island. There were ships upon the sea. They were so numerous their sails masked the waves. And there were columns of smoke on the land, and dragons in the sky. Fell wraiths bestrode the thunderous lizards, raining destruction from the firmament. The armies of Nawami fought, were defeated, and fell back to reform their companies. The woman in white summoned dread sorceries with which to lend them aid. Even that was not enough.

  Then the stone beast spoke. It opened its mouth and said a Word. The Word called forth thunder and doom. Skull-faced wraiths plummeted from the sky. Dragons screamed and clawed their ears. The invaders fled to their ships.

  They did not remain gone. A Power dwelt on the island in the east. Ethrian could feel it, could sense its name. Nahaman the Odite. A woman of great evil and great Power, possessed by hatred, obsessed with a need to destroy Nawami.

  Nahaman rallied her armies and struck again. They rolled across the land and descended from the clouds. Neither the witchery of the woman in white nor the Word of the stone beast could shatter the countless waves of them. Each time they came, their attack crested a little nearer the stone beast’s mountain.

  Ethrian soon realized he was seeing generations of struggle condensed into a night, an age of warfare reduced to its high points.

  The hordes of the Odite did come to the mountain. They destroyed everything they could, and silenced the stone beast’s mouth.

  Nahaman came ashore. With the aid of her skull-faced wraiths she smote the land barren. The woman in white and the monster of stone could do naught but watch. The beast’s mouth was his Power and her life. Nawami’s sole preservation, in the beast’s wan power, lay between those great rock paws.

  Nahaman and the survivors of her host withdrew to the island, and thence overseas, and darkened the shores of Nawami no more.

  Ethrian was puzzled. All that drama and violence, just to sail away? What was it all about?

  The woman in white became older. He felt her despair. Long had she lived. Long had the mouth of the stone beast preserved her youth and beauty. Now she aged. She withered. She became a crone. She begged for death. The beast would not let her die. Her body became old dry sticks. Even that faded away, till she was no more than an aching spirit fluttering the slopes of the beast’s mountain.

  Ethrian wakened to the light of dawn. He had slept the clock around. He smelled sweet water. He scrambled to the pool.

  Not till he had slaked his thirst did he notice that his hands no longer ached. They remained raw, but seemed on their way to a miraculous healing.

  He stood and examined himself. His feet, too, were improving rapidly. His knees were better. Even the sting of the sunburn had disappeared.

  He whirled around, suddenly frightened.

  Near where he had slept lay a pair of sandals, a neatly folded toga, and a leaf on which stood a stack of seedcakes.

  Fear and hunger warred within him. Hunger won. He seized the cakes, fled to the pool, alternately ate and drank. When he finished, he clothed himself. Sandals and toga fit perfectly.

  He began exploring. Try as he might, he found no evidence of any presence but his own. He stared at the stone beast. Was there a ghost of a smile on those weathered lips?

  He climbed the monster and looked round from the peak of its great head.

  For as far as he could see this country was lifeless. The flatter land was ochre and rust. The mountains were bare grey stone.

  He knew he would never leave. No mere mortal could storm that wasteland and hope to evade the Dark Lady’s eternal embrace.

  That old man had not done him much of a favor.

  He tried calling the woman in white, the stone beast, even Nahaman the Odite. His shouts did nothing but stir muted echoes.

  Some seemed echoes of timeless mirth.

  He returned to his place by the pool.

  “Deliverer.”

  The voice came to him out of dream. The woman was beside him, but the word had not come from her. It had whispered down from above.

  “What?”

  “Deliverer. The one foretold. The one whose coming I prophesied in the hour of our despair. He who shall deliver us from the curse of Nahaman and restore to us the days of glory.”

  Ethrian was thoroughly baffled.

  “Long have we awaited your coming, our powers dwindling to a ghost of what once was. Free us of our shackles and we will grant your every whim. Unchain us and we will make of you a Lord of the earth, as were our servants of old, before Nahaman rebelled and flung her dark horde against us.”

  Ethrian did not feel like anyone’s savior. He felt like what he was, a confused, frightened boy. He had stumbled onto something bigger than he, something beyond comprehension. He was interested in surviving, finding his way home, and getting back at his enemies. In that order.

  “You have fears and hatreds within you, Deliverer. We see them. We read them as a scribe reads the leaves of a book. We say, free us. Together shall we trample your enemies into the dust. Indite. Reveal unto the Deliverer the chained might of Nawami, that shall be his to wield as a spear of revenge.”

  The woman in white walked into the darkness between the beast’s paws.

  Ethrian envisioned those who had imprisoned him, those who had carried off his mother and made insupportable demands upon his father. Only Lord Chin had perished. His henchmen remained alive.

  Shinsan, the Dread Empire, was their spawning ground. He would destroy Shinsan if the power came to his hand.

  “That power is yours now, Deliverer. You need but accept it. Follow Sahmanan. Let her become your first minister in the restoration of Nawami.”

  The woman in white beckoned from the shadows. Ethrian walked toward her. She preceded him into darkness.

  That darkness grew more intense, more tangible with every step. He extended a hand, expecting to encounter the stone between the beast’s huge forelegs.

  He walked many times that distance. He encountered no barrier. The woman vanished. He kept touch only by pursuing a sort of wordless whisper she trailed behind. He could not take her hand. Unlike the stone beast, she had no substance.

  Suddenly, he stepped into light.

  He gaped. And a tale came back, told him by his father’s erstwhile friend, Bragi Ragnarson, the godfather who might have conspired in the destruction of his godson’s family.

  The Hall of the Mountain King. The Under Mountain, or Thunder Mountain as the Trolledyngjans called it. The caverns where a King of the Dead held sway, and sent damned spirits riding the mountain winds in search of mortal prey….

  He stood on a narrow ledge overlooking a cavern so vast its nether bounds could not be discerned. Sahmanan stood beside him. She gestured. So faintly it was almost inaudible, he heard, “All this is yours to command, Deliverer.”

  They were arrayed in motionless battalions and regiments, in perfectionist rank and file, an army frozen in time. Their number was beyond Ethrian’s comprehension. They were both warriors in white and warriors of the breed that had stormed Nawami in the name of Nahaman the Odite. Footmen. Horsemen. Elephanteers. Fell skullfaces still astride their dragon steeds.

  They had been captured in a crystalline moment, like insects in amber. They poised motionless beneath a light from nowhere that neither waxed nor waned nor wavered. An air of tension, of impatient waiting, pervaded the caver
n.

  “They know you, Deliverer. They are eager to find life in your avenging hand.”

  “What are they?” the boy demanded. “Where did they come from?”

  “Long before Nawami fell it was obvious that Nahaman would work her will. We sidestepped her fury by slipping out the door of time. We allowed her her victory. We devoted our Power to preparations for the day a Deliverer would release us from the bonds she would impose. We did not expect you to be so long coming, nor did we foresee her so weakening us that a sending of dolphins would almost be beyond us.”

  Ethrian’s basic questions remained unanswered. He suspected he would not find the important answers till too late. “Who are these people?”

  “Some of the fallen of the Nawami Crusades. They were reanimated, motivated, and preserved by our art,” said the voice of the stone beast. “They, too, await their Deliverer.” Dead men? Ethrian thought. He was supposed to perform some foul necromancy that would recall the dead?

  Revulsion hit him. The dead were much feared in his age.

  The woman in white faced him. A smile toyed with her mouth. She began to talk. Her words did not synchronize with the movement of her lips.

  “You have your enemies, do you not?” Her speech seemed to come from afar, like a whispering breeze through pines. “Here lies the power to lay them low, Deliverer.”

  Ethrian was young, confused, frightened, and dreaming, but he was not stupid. He knew there would be a price.

  What was it?

  “Free us,” the woman insisted. “Deliver us. That’s all we ask.”

  Ethrian gazed upon the armies in waiting, the armies of the dead, and reflected on the fall of Nawami. Should such fury be released again? Could it be controlled? Was revenge so important?

  What other force could face the might of the Dread Empire? Only these elder sorceries could withstand those boiling in Shinsan today.

  And he had himself to consider. If he refused them, would Sahmanan and the beast help him survive? Why should they bother?

  He would become one more bone monument to the deadliness of this land.

  He walked away from the woman, back whence he had come, till again he could see the silvered scape of the barrens. There were lights on the island in the east. He glared at them, hating the people who had lighted them.